Carriots: Please, introduce your teamAd Ackbar: We are two chilean based developers. Jorge does the electronics and I, José Luis, deal with the programming part and Carriots integration.

Carriots: How did you know about Carriots?Ad Ackbar: We’ve seen Carriots in Postcapes. It seemed quite simple to do a simple proof of concept project.

Carriots: What is your IoT experience?Ad Ackbar: We’ve played around with some Arduino experiments and tried Raspberry Pi as a media centre. We do not have much background in this kind of projects, but our “Imperial pig” experience has been a good start.

Carriots: How long did it take to do this project?Ad Ackbar: It’s difficult to have an exact effort estimation. We’ve worked on it on weekends an spare time and started some weeks ago. We’ve spent some days experimenting before we decided to participate in the challenge. Since then, I think no more than a week of effective work.

Carriots: Tell us more about the project. From the idea to the implementation.Ad Ackbar: At the office someone always starts some quiz competition around geek themes. Discussions often goes far enough to take wikipedia and/or youtube to decide who holds the truth or the final answer.
When Carriots published the Domokun stuffed toy tutorial we take the code, a Raspberry Pi and two speakers just to make our “Imperial pig” play the voice with the final word. The challenge was just the natural way to improve it. We have to put all the electronic stuff in it, solve communication and power issues and that’s all!
Jorge did the buttons, speaker and power implementations. And I did the integration with Carriots and the quiz logic. The Domokun stuffed toy tutorial was a very good start point since most of the logic was already coded and tested. We also used the button tricks from the forum discussion.
Components are: Raspberry Pi, SD card, portable speaker, battery pack, wi-fi dongle and some electronic stuff (resistors, buttons, wires, etc.)

Carriots: Where did you buy the hardware?Ad Ackbar: Element14, adafruit and dealextreme.

Carriots: Which aspect of Carriots do you prefer?Ad Ackbar: Simplicity, arbitrary code execution and the events system.

Carriots: Which aspect of Carriots would you improve?Ad Ackbar: Documentation, alarm processing and debug for developers.

Carriots: Will you continue with the project?Ad Ackbar: We don’t really know, perhaps implement the screen option could be the next feature.

Carriots: Any recommendation for future challengers?Ad Ackbar: I can recommend challengers to try it, you will learn a lot of useful and fun concepts.

Carriots: How will you spend the money prize?Ad Ackbar: We will buy Star Wars stuff for the office and a screen to complete the toy.

As you might know, our challenge is now over and we finally have the winner. The project is a stuffed starwars/angrybirds quiz teller toy. Simple and efficient. It just ask a question and you have to reply by pushing a button (the ears). After some questions you will know your level.

“Imperial pig”, the stuffed toy’s name, uses Carriots to store the quizz (questions and correct answers) and the accomplishment level. Questions, answers and levels can be customized through Carriots control panel or using the REST API.

“Imperial pig” questions are Star Wars related (as seen on the video) and it defies you to become a Jedi Master by answering the questions. Cool!

Ad Ackbar team send us a making-of photo and a video. The video will be published in YouTube (thanks guys).

Ad Ackbar Star Wars Quiz project making-of

As we can see, Raspberry Pi is the “intelligence” inside the toy and it communicates via wi-fi to Carriots.

We’ve asked some questions to the team that will be soon published. The interview will tell us more details about the project and the team behind it.

“The Death Star is a space station capable of destroying a planet with one shot of its superlaser. Which is the planet, home of Princess Leia, under attack in the fourth episode? Alderaan or Dagobah?”

Thanks all for your participation and congratulations to Ad Ackbar team.

The Bear has nice T-shirt of a Raspberrry Pi and does not need batteries.

The domo-kun is stuffed with electronics and two set of batteries:

DomokunM2M electric organs

and does strange things:

DomokunM2M synchro with Dropbox

The bear is part of Raspberry Pi new set of merchandise. On their blog they have posted a competition to give him a name and you can win the toy. The competition ends at midnight on Tuesday April 16.

The other teddy (the strange one) is connected to Internet and can Tweet, Talk (Text to Speech), Plays videos and Synchronizes content with Dropbox thanks to Carriots. This super cool stuffed toy (batteries included) has a name: DomokunM2M. The domokunM2M is part of our 1st Developer challenge and you can make it yourself following this tutorial . Our challenge ends tomorrow. But you can follow the above tutorial to create the next generation of toys. In fact DomokunM2M was created in just 2 week in the crazy lab of Carriots.